I painted this in less than half an hour to put into a slide for my final presentation in my summer public speaking class. My presentation was a persuasive speech about gender stuff. I needed a filler slide so that a slide with information wasn't left hanging, and an astronomical painting seemed nice. I used the non-binary flag colors for the planet: Black for the shadow, white for the highlight, purple and yellow for the cloud streaks. Arguably, the painting also uses white and black with the color of space and the stars, but that hardly counts.
There's also a prototype version of this that I wanted to use, but which didn't quite make the cut. I've uploaded it to the sketch gallery on the site.
I learned to do planet paintings from youtuber CaseyDoesEverything. This is a good demonstration of his method. Since I am working digitally, rather than with physical media, I had to figure out how to adapt some of his methods, but the principles are the same. Instead of a bowl, I just use a circle guide, and I use separated layers and locked layer transparency for much of it. Probably the one aspect I have the hardest time directly replicating is using crumpled newspaper to peel up wet paint for texture, but I get by well enough building texture in my own way, as long as I stick to planets with fairly uniform surfaces- gas giants, ocean worlds, or planets with thick cloud cover.
